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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

I am a “product minded” developer and feel absolutely murdered after a couple years at a large European tech co. The product, and teams, and goals, and people, and managers and everything at all keeps changing over and over and I never really see my efforts amounting to much. New people assigned to projects come with their own agendas and all that you worked for is now forgotten. The relationships you built don’t matter anymore.

At this point I think life would have been a lot easier if I did not care about product - and now I realize many have figured this out sooner than I.

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Don't get too caught up in the internal views and politics/machinations of day to day.

The internal views are important, but the external views, market aspect, user experience of your product is most important.

Even if only one person ever uses it, make it at least a pleasant and good experience.

I like to essentially live in products, get fully invested in it and make it something that somehow, in a way, becomes a 'friend'. Something that helps users and they don't mind revisiting. Find the fun or at least the good experience.

Luckily, making games and interactive projects makes that easier than say an insurance form, but even the latter, make it a pleasant part of the day even if it is low impact internally. Make it functional and fun if possible or at least pleasant and predictable where it needs to be.

I always get a bit annoyed when companies are too focused internally not externally, from the market, from the user perspectives. In fact, self-obsessed internal companies that value the politics internally more valuable than the external products the company produces, those are typically not successful companies or products down the line.

What is particularly bad is when you have to fight to put in quality or features that users want, that make a better product, but it harms your perception because of the production level you want adds time or managers/bizdevs might not see the value when it is very valuable. Internal politics can also discourage workers from attempting to make products better. No one wants to expend all their energy just getting the ability to build. Do it, show it, ask for forgiveness later as permission might not have the full picture to green light it.

Be proud of every product you make, make it quality, make it useful, make it fun, and broadcast it internally but don't get discouraged with the internal focused perception, obsess over the external views including user perception, market perception and it will win the internal perception by default. If you make enough good products and projects, eventually they come around.

You are what you make.

I am sorry to play the devil's advocate but aren't you one of those with their own agenda's too? It's just matter of perspective how to judge yourself vs others, and putting yourself into the `good guys` camp seems biased to me.

A few examples: top-rank dev preserving power by slowing down growth for everyone, designer pairing with executive to sidestep decision-making - and destroy previous work by the team in the process, new people looking solely for promotions, new managers caring more about looking good than helping the product stay on track (i.e. replacing a very well-planned roadmap with vanity or metrics-hacking features). Most of these result in developers now working on things that have no real impact or don’t make sense for the product, and it hurts.

You might be right, and it’s not fair of me to expect everyone to have the same driving goals, but I simply miss the ability to focus on building something good (for customers and the business) and everyone being in tune, instead of catering to an endless stream of personal needs. Worse, in order to “perform well” it forces you to prioritize saving face and pleasing people over actual product/design/engineering, since half of your peers don’t care, or will be gone by next cycle.

You have to be conscious that you are playing the game of power and politics. You subtly invade other people's responsibilities, and question their capabilities.

Maybe you're good enough to make it clear that your only trying to help, but maybe there is a 3rd person that competes not with you but with the person you're trying to help, that will take advantage and make it look like they're clueless.

Maybe the person you're trying to help will respond positively when you're around, maybe they'll talk behind your back with the right people to shut you down.

While I can’t vouch for every org at my company, it sounds like you’re in a bad place and might benefit from switching orgs/companies.

Unfortunately Europe doesn't have that many great tech options depending on where you live...

That's true of basically every country or continent. If you're in the USA, but you're stuck in a small village in the Midwest for a personal reason, your options aren't going to be as good compared to someone living in the Bay Area (or one of the tech hubs in Europe, for that matter).

Yes, though practically speaking, moving within the USA is much easier than moving within Europe (different languages, work authorization may be required, incompatible retail banking systems, vastly different school systems, etc) and then there's no silicon valley type concentration anywhere.

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